I get it, especially for users that have always been more on the lurking side (and this isn’t judging, that has always been the majority for any platform) - it can be a bit empty. As someone who has been here since 4 years ago (now I’m on a new account on my own instance), the first two years of that basically just visiting every few months out of curiosity, I can slowly see more diverse communities popping up recently, beyond the established strong points of Lemmy (FOSS, Politics, LGBTQ+ memes). And this time, unlike the first Reddit exodus, I have more confidence in them not immediately dying from lack of conviction and activity.

But of course, the sheer gargantuan user count of Reddit comes with many advantages. For many obscure topics, there will still be enough people, that a sufficient amount of “super users” congregate to provide content and moderation, so that lurkers can usually participate and still post sporadically. The latter is of course also a giant advantage, millions of people posting occasionally still provide lots and lots of posts and comments. And of course, it will take a long time and more fuckups for Reddit not simply being “the default” if you want to create a forum for a community around something. (Also, waaay too much of our knowledge is on that platform, we carelessly gave answers to help fellow humans, and now the answers are on Reddit for them to appear in countless internet searches, and for them to do with as they please.)

Where Lemmy currently has its strong suits is enthusiasm of parts of the user base, fewer issues getting noticed at all among the millions of (bot/re)-posts, and where there is activity, I’ve usually seen it panning out being able to handle actual discussions. (Though, lets not kid ourselves, of course the Reddit-like structure also still encourages circle jerks. I don’t even think that is that large of a problem, but it’s a reality.)

If you feel you end up having the energy to keep a community alive through dry spell, sure, be the change you seek, but it’s okay and understandable if you don’t want to invest the energy and work (at the moment). In that case, just stay tuned, check out the communities that pop up in all/scaled or all/new for interesting ones currently getting more traction, the Threadiverse will take a long time before it can replace a giant like reddit, but it has a few good stones for its sling up its sleeve.

Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.

Wow, I guess they have now literally reached the earliest one they could do a live action remake of. Good to know that even while things have been heating up globally, the underlying current of absolute boredom in this dystopia is going strong.

What is this about? This?

Haven’t been on reddit and am notoriously often living under a rock when it comes to news outside my personal interests.

I think that is utlimately valid - although I think the other options are all coming with their own problems. You will then have to instead live with the interests of tech corporations (including nonprofits who ultimately need funding) and advertisers collecting your data, whose interests will ultimately not be much less malignant - or small free software projects of a sometimes quite limited scope. The latter, I think, is also a valid niché, but will leave the overall standards of the internet to corporate interests.

Considering how the CEO here acts for Brave, in my opinion, this is not simply about him being an asshole or being politically questionable. To me - everything about him screams “grifter taking advantage of people’s legitimate concerns” - and he has a material interest in your data as well. Brave always felt to me like trying to sell and market privacy instead of proving to me, in their fundamentals, that they actually have my interests in mind.

Which is why I, personally, do not really understand choosing Brave above LibreWolf (or Tor Browse, occasionally), if privacy is your #1 priority.

Oh, yes, it wasn’t a direct answer, also, I’m not the person you answered to. Ultimately, my comment was more meant as an overall addition to the discussion, building on the idea of what a solution to:

Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.

might be.

But as answers to your two points. #1 - I have no idea where they got that from, myself #2 - I think you answered that one yourself rather well, and I wanted to build on that one.

Sorry if that was confusing, my brain is also good at confusing myself at times, can’t imagine how that is for others at times.

I can somewhat understand the overall criticism, because Librewolf - as far as my understanding goes - would be in trouble without the work being done on the code upstream.

Personally, I know that this does not exist (yet), and to some people that put privacy above everything else with a more libertarian slant, this might sound like the worst option imaginable, but my “dream” way to handle it within the current economic system would be:

Have an open source, FOSS base, web-engine and all, developed with public funds similar to public broadcasting in many countries (Bonus if carried by international organisations instead of just national. Think a UN institution like UNESCO or WHO, but focused on making the internet accessible neutrally and to all). On top of that code, projects that want to put privacy above all else could still feasibly built projects like LibreWolf (an even Brave), relying somewhat comfortably on secure fundamentals.

I know, sounds like a dream, which it is at this point. But every other solution within the current economic status quo I personally thin of, I see no chance of enshittification not always encroaching and creating crises, if not outright taking over.

Oh, just to not accidentally create the wrong impression - that’s not me, I just shared the video and didn’t want to editorialise the title. If you want to give them your message (that I think is important, indeed) - you can follow the link and should be able to comment with many different activitypub account options (PeerTube itself, Mastodon, etc.) - sadly, I don’t think Lemmy is possible yet, because its design isn’t user-centric but content-centric, and it lacks some of those AP-capabilities.

That’s what I usually liken it to

Oh, that is almost comforting to hear, because a clear profit motive that can be linked to the original messages would indeed be pointing towards scam instead of weird stalker. That being said, it sadly would not on its own completely do away with the theory.

The current most likely theory of the people that dove headfirst into this seems to be, that she was a small streamer on peertube and other platforms (hence the many different webcam images, too). Looking into the chat of the stream on her peertube account reveals at least one person, that had all their messages removed by her. The linked accounts on the most common spam messages feel more like doxxing attempts, too - with ones like this asking for money most likely being copycats, as in the original messages and linked communities, there was a suspicious lack of asking for money or trying to start contact for a romance/catfishing scam.

This would all point to some kind of crazy stalker trying to doxx this woman for whatever reason, in a pretty weird way. Maybe they hoped it would get us all riled up and hating on her? Maybe they thought by just seeing her, we’d react in some way? Maybe they just wanted the feeling of power to doxx and intimidate her, and no real plan beyond that?

Whatever it is, it really looks more like creepy shit than scam shit at this point, from what I have gathered in the community research that has been happening.

🫡 Comrade Trump 🫡

Wow, you’re right of course. I completely forgot kwrite still existed, tbh.

Not sure what this is about

If I were to give them the biggest empathy I can muster, they may just remove it as silently as possible out of fear of having to moderate the comments of bound-to-be popular post according to reddit’s increasingly stupid rules of discourse.

Still unjustified censorship, very worrysome - but I could on an emotional level understand being fed up with everything at this point and just powertripping because “fuck everything, I don’t want to deal with anything like this, I am not getting paid enough/at all”.

I genuinely do a lot of coding in Kate, the standard KDE editor. It’s enough to do a lot of things, has highlighting, and is more than enough when you just need a quick fix.

I am also still using nano when editing stuff in the terminal. Please, don’t judge me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

Thank you! Seems to be working now!

I was pretty sure I had already tried that, but I probably had something else not configured correctly when I did, so I probably hadn’t tried it yet with the proper combination of values in addition to that! (I am glad I haven’t managed to break it somewhere else while trying stuff)

Now, as much as I genuinely respect what their scientists have achieved with DeepSeek, especially with limited resources and import restrictions on hardware, and how it is Open Source and all - this will most likely end up enshittifying 90% of what it touches, still, just as “AI” like that does anywhere. “Good” to see those dynamics are the same on both sides of the Pacific (and Atlantic, actually), including overvalued stocks from hype.

Also, is archive.ph down? I tried .ph and .is and both timed out for me, when I tried to generate an easy-to-share link to the article.

Aw shit, here I go, this meme just reminded me, that me thinking “I’ll take a quick break from working on my mailserver integration stuff” was 6 hours ago.